In recent years, medical diagnostic imaging apparatuses such as ultrasonic diagnosis apparatuses, for example, have been connected to various intra-hospital systems built in hospitals. Such connection enables medical images to be efficiently operated, for example, transferred, checked in a medical image storage and outputted to imagers, and thereby enables the medical images to be utilized for medical activities.
In communications of a medical diagnostic imaging apparatus with any of apparatuses constituting the intra-hospital system, the two apparatuses firstly establish connection therebetween through TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), and then perform communications in accordance with DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) communication protocol.
In this case, it is necessary to set various kinds of parameters required for the two apparatuses to perform DICOM communications therebetween, and most of the setting work is done through manual operations by an operator of the medical diagnostic imaging apparatus. For this reason, the setting requires a lot of time and effort, which is a situation where an error is likely to occur in the setting. In order to solve such problems, there has been proposed a method in which various parameters are preset in a medical diagnostic imaging apparatus and the set parameters are used as needed (see Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-285376).
The above method, however, requires various parameters to be preset, and accordingly such setting still requires the effort and the like. Particularly recently, for ultrasonic diagnosis apparatuses, for example, a connection verification method in conformity with a measurement result SR (Structured Reporting) format has been employed. However, a general ultrasonic diagnosis apparatus supports a huge number of measurement and calculation items, specifically, about 4000 items, including combinations with the preset items of the apparatus.
Meanwhile, following recommendations of the DICOM standard, many vendors open the communication specifications of apparatuses to the public by presenting them in the document format called CS (Conformance Statement) on home pages of their companies.
In addition, a medical diagnostic imaging apparatus used in a hospital and, for example, a viewer apparatus configured to display the medical image acquired by the medical diagnostic imaging apparatus are manufactured by different companies in many cases. For this reason, under time and geographical constraints or security constraints, connection between a medical diagnostic imaging apparatus and a viewer apparatus needs to be verified before actual installation, and therefore it is often difficult to verify the connection by directly connecting the two apparatuses with each other.